Marketing and the Production of Consumers' Objective Violence

On May 19, 2015, a cardiologist named Jaime Gold, 56 years old, was attacked by a group of boys in Rio de Janeiro. He was stabbed in the abdomen and died the next morning. His death triggered a wave of emotional reactions among the residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Sul, a large and affluent part of the city, where the feeling of insecurity, already high, literally skyrocketed. He was riding his bicycle around the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a lagoon linked to Ipanema beach by a 140-meter channel. Today, three years later, a shrine marks the spot of the attack: a bike is tied to the low metal railings that are supposed to protect passersby from falling into the lagoon (see Figure 24.1 ). The boys, all minors, wanted his expensive bike to sell on the black market. This alone, however, does not explain the extreme brutality of the attack.